Pedagogy of the Oppressed

I think this document really stresses the importance of education beyond the school grounds. It helps us realize that our attempts to educate children are more than simply trying to stuff them with information (what Freire calls “Banking Education”) and is about trying to raise the next generation of critically thinking adults. What I find somewhat difficult about this concept, however, is how one is supposed to have a “problem-posing” classroom when many times the best means of giving information for the students to discuss is to lecture about such a subject. Ultimately, I think it comes down to giving them the basic framework that they need in order to discuss a topic or idea intelligently and then seeking an understanding of that topic or idea through thorough discussion where, instead of focusing on your aspect as teacher, or even facilitator, you focus on your role as a fellow student of ideas and problems. All that we as teachers must do is present the problem to be discussed and perhaps a minimal amount of background knowledge in order for students to access that information.

While the language used in this article is rather thick, it is fairly obvious why it has stood as such a valuable commentary on the necessity of today’s education to be something more than just pouring a load of facts into a passive brain that will ultimately forget everything by the end of the semester. I think that fostering an environment that focuses on the ability of students to play a completely active and integral role in their own education is an accomplishable feat, though it certainly will require a concentrated and careful effort on our part as teachers to ensure that how we are teaching is not oppressing our students’ ability to function in a real world where information and reality are constantly and consistently in flux, and where what may be true of a topic today may not prove true of that same topic tomorrow.

Assessing and Evaluating Students' Learning

                I actually looked forward to reading this particular article because assessing student learning is something that I struggle with. I haven’t come up with what I feel is an effective, fair system for assessing how a broad range of students with equally broad ranges of life experience and ability can be fairly assessed as to whether they are meeting certain standards without somehow making those who are failing, by no fault of their own, to meet those standards feel as if they are failures. The assessment tools and strategies in this article certainly provide many different ways in which to assess student learning and many, if not all of them, seem that they would be very effective in assessing traditional scholastic abilities, however, they still seem to marginalize those who do not thrive in a traditional scholastic environment.

                While I am aware that there is likely no perfecting assessment strategy, I think it important that we constantly attempt to improve our strategies to help those who maybe do not fit the norm set out in classroom-style education. The strategies most effective in this regard are likely those that focus on assessing students based on their own improvement in relation to their own achievements, as opposed to assessing them based on the achievement of their peers who may, or may not, have had similar life experiences and challenges as themselves. The problem with this, however, is that there are specific standards to which the education system holds all students, and standards while difficult to create fairly, must exist in order for evaluation of learning to take place.

                Obviously, I do not have the answers to my concerns and the chapter does not really address these issues, other than the bit on standardized, high-stakes testing, but I still find much in the chapter that is helpful. It does provide several examples of grading rubrics and how to establish these rubrics in a fairly formulaic and easy to follow format. Also, I find the example of a rubric for grading class discussion to be a pretty good example of how I would like to assess discussion in my own classroom. For the most part, I found the chapter informative, but not very helpful in addressing the big issues of student assessment.

Assignment Template for ELA

The assignment template was a pretty thorough bit of writing. I was impressed with how it systematically seemed to move students from a contemplation of reading, through the actual reading itself and into writing about the reading. Along those same lines, for some reason it had never occurred to me that writing for understanding and learning still constituted effective academic writing, which this method of reading and writing definitely indicates and supports. I especially appreciated the authors’ efforts to include direct support from the CCSS for every aspect of their reading and writing strategy. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the template to me, however, is the “Connecting Reading to Writing” section. This brief section lays out what I feel is a very easy to follow and seemingly very effective means of helping any reader come to a better understanding of how they can write about whatever it is they are reading, and I wish that I had had some of these strategies taught to me in grade school rather than having to find them on my own.

                My only real concern with the template is that it seems to focus primarily on reading informative text rather than focusing on literary text. While all of the ideas presented in the article would be effective in understanding literature, they do seem to lack guidance in how a reader should go about taking what seems to be just a story about a given set of characters and translating that into meaningful arguments and ideas. I would like to see some discussion on helping students come to understand how characters can represent ideas by how they interact with the circumstances and other characters provided within a literary narrative and various other aspects of such works and how they move from narrative to thought and argument.

                For the most part, however, I was very impressed with what the template provided and am actually quite grateful because it provides me with an effective means of helping students move through the reading aspects and into writing about the reading itself. Thus improving reading comprehension and writing skills.

Team Teaching: Benefits, Challenges and Approaches; TPA Lesson Plans

I found the depth of the TPA lesson plans to be rather extensive, this obviously facilitates deep consideration of exactly what is being taught in any given lesson as well as how said lessons can be effectively measured and assessed. My biggest concern, however, is that it seems that there is a lot of room for lessons to be overthought and over-prepared. While I understand needing to teach with a specific purpose in mind, and to have an idea of how you are going to get there, planning every single minute of that lesson seems ill-advised and makes readjusting that plan as needed more difficult. This also seems to leave very little room for students to reflect on what they have learned in the time they have spent in the classroom. On the other hand, without a format such as the TPA lesson plan, one would run the risk of having no direction whatsoever for their lessons, leading into tangents, digression and probably over-teaching.

                In the two articles on team teaching I found particularly interesting the aspect of having one of the two team teachers act as an “exemplary student” by centralizing themselves in the classroom and acting in a specific way. The benefits of this would be extraordinary! Just taking the few examples of roles suggested in the article (which was certainly not an exhaustive list of all the ways one could take advantage of such a set up), you could have the non-active teacher step into whichever role best fit the subject matter or flow of the classroom. Imagine the benefit of having a “devil’s advocate” in the room to act as a catalyst for discussion, and even to act as someone within the discussion group who can bring them back on track!

                The other article presented many aspects of team teaching that I remember seeing as a student in grade school myself. I do not feel that all of those presented would be as effective as others (the one about having the other teacher take a small group aside is one that I have never been a big fan of, for the reasons listed in the article), but many of them could be used in various different ways to insure differentiation of teaching style, classroom management, and efficiency of learning as well as many other aspects.

Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts

I was surprised to find that there were not nearly as many goals and standards required for the varying grade levels as I would have suspected. My experience with most efforts to standardize a curriculum or any other large body of information for instruction generally involves an exhaustive list with multiple bullet points and unachievable amounts of information to be delivered in a very short time. Based on the standards presented on the website, it would seem that the Common Core has made some effort to streamline, or perhaps generalize, these standards into a few key points. That said, however, it is likely that what is presented on the website is not indicative of every bit of the minutiae involved in ensuring that all of the various aspects of these general standards are delivered in a year long school curriculum. The handout we were given points this aspect out as well as visiting many of the common arguments against the standardization of education, most notably the tendency for these kinds of standards to not be applicable to the less dominant cultures in American society. However, at least in the first chapter of the book which the handout represents, there appears to be no suggestion for how to fix this common discrepancy. However, I think that the standards given in the CCSS are applicable to any culture and focus more on the fundamental aspects of reading, comprehending and analyzing literary and informational texts.

Discussion in a Democratic Society

It is clear to anyone who has spent a significant amount of time in an English or Language Arts classroom that discussion is an invaluable part of understanding reading, structuring and evaluating writing and grappling with the controversial or thought-provoking ideas delivered by many literary texts. This article helps articulate the kind of environment that must prevail in order for such discussion to thrive. Most interesting to me is the thoughts expressed about discussion itself and the focus placed upon how the ideas presented by the various members of a classroom can help each individual member gain a greater understanding of their own ideas as well as challenge those ideas which they may take for granted. I think most important to me is the idea of Autonomy expressed by the authors of this article. We must remember that the students we are dealing with in secondary classrooms are at critical points in the development of their world-view and their stand on difficult topics. By helping them remember that they may remain firm in their own beliefs while still trying to understand the beliefs and views of others helps us and them to foster an environment of acceptance of any view, even those they may not hold true with the predominant viewpoint. Of course, it also allows us to remind them that we discuss difficult concepts because we want one another to challenge our beliefs if only to make them stronger.